Thursday, May 5, 2016

BT and its Openreach and EE businesses will between them spend around £6 billion pounds in capital expenditure over the next three years in the first phase of a plan to extend superfast broadband and 4G coverage beyond 95 per cent of the country by 2020.

Ultrafast broadband will be deployed to a minimum of ten million homes and businesses in the same period, subject to regulatory support, with an ambition to reach twelve million. There will be an increased focus on FTTP, with the aim being to reach two million premises with the technology, mainly in new housing developments, high streets and business parks.

BT Group Chief Executive Gavin Patterson said: “The UK is a digital leader today and it is vital that it remains one in the future. That is why we are announcing a further six billion pounds of investment in our UK networks, subject to regulatory certainty. Networks require money and a lot of it. Virgin and BT have both pledged to invest and we will now see if others follow our lead. Infrastructure competition is good for the UK and so is the current Openreach model whereby others can piggyback on our investment should they want to.

“G.fast is an important technology that will enable us to deploy ultrafast broadband at pace and to as many homes as possible. Customers want their broadband to be affordable as well as fast and we will be able to do that using G.fast. FTTP will also play a bigger role going forward and I believe it is particularly well suited to those businesses who may need speeds of up to 1 Gbps. My ambition is to roll it out to two million premises and our trials give me confidence we will."

In February 2016, Ofcom, the official regulator in the UK, decided not to require a structural separation of Openreach from BT, although new proposals were set to require further fibre rollouts and greater independence of Openreach from its parent company.

Alibaba Group reported very strong performance in Q1, with revenues coming in at RMB 24,184 million (US$3,751 million), an increase of 39% year-over-year.

Alibaba's China retail marketplaces revenue was RMB18,340 million (US$2,844 million), an increase of 41% YoY. Mobile revenue was RMB13,084 million (US$2,029 million), an increase of 149% YoY. Annual active buyers on our China retail marketplaces increased to 423 million, an increase of 16 million over the prior quarter, while mobile MAUs in March reached 410 million, an increase of 17 million over December 2015.

Aliyun (or AliCloud in English), the company's cloud business unit, is seeing even faster growth, with revenue increasing 175% year-over-year to RMB1,066 million (US$165 million), representing an acceleration of the 126% year-over-year growth rate achieved in the prior quarter.

As of March 31, 2016, AliCloud had over 2.3 million customers, including more than 500,000 paying customers. In the March quarter, AliCloud launched 612 new features and services and 22 new products, including 12 in the big data category. Big data products include computing engines, data collection and data analysis, with a MaxCompute service empowering customers to process up to 100 petabytes of data in under six hours.

Arista Networks announced Q1 revenues of $242.2 million, a decrease of 1.3% compared to the fourth quarter of 2015, and an increase of 35.3% from the first quarter of 2015. GAAP net income was $35.2 million, or $0.48 per diluted share, compared to GAAP net income of $24.5 million, or $0.34 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2015. GAAP gross margin came in at 64.0%, compared to GAAP gross margin of 63.6% in the fourth quarter of 2015 and 65.8% in the first quarter of 2015.

"As we kick off 2016, we delivered a solid quarter,” stated Jayshree Ullal, Arista President and CEO. “We continue to experience increased relevance and acceptance from our customers in the ongoing shift to cloud networking.”

Pivotal, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, expects to close a Series C financing round highlighted by $253 million in new cash, led by new investor Ford Motor Company, in conjunction with Microsoft and all previous investors GE, EMC and VMware.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is an enterprise cloud native platform for building new software "at startup speed." The company said its Cloud Native platform drives software innovation for many of the world’s most admired brands.

Microsoft said its investment in Pivotal is a response to growing enterprise developers’ desire for an even closer relationship between Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Microsoft Azure.

Pivotal announced the following milestones:

The company now works with seven of the top 10 U.S. banks, three of the top five global auto manufacturers, and five of the top 10 telecommunication companies.

Recently announced first-quarter 2016 revenue of $83 million, up 56% year over year

Annualized recurring revenue of $116 million at March 31, 2016, up more than 200% year over year for Pivotal’s subscription software products—Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Big Data Suite

Pivotal works with nearly one-third of the Fortune 100 companies, including industry leaders such as GE, Ford, Verizon, Home Depot, Comcast, Humana, Lockheed Martin, and Allstate, each using Pivotal’s products and services to digitally transform their businesses and disrupt established markets.

“Here at Pivotal we are partnering with customers to create a world where the largest and most admired companies can build and run software like Google, Uber or any venture-backed startup. This investment will accelerate our global reach to bring our unique software development methodology and modern cloud platform and analytics tools to every forward-thinking CEO,” said Rob Mee, Pivotal CEO. “We are excited to announce Ford and Microsoft as strategic partners to help introduce Pivotal’s transformative cloud and analytics software to the next thousand customers.”http://pivotal.io/

“CloudCredo enhances Pivotal’s powerful next-generation portfolio of products and services by bringing extensive knowledge of deploying, running and customizing Cloud Foundry for some of the world’s largest and most admired brands,” said Rob Mee, CEO of Pivotal. “With this expertise, we can better help our customers transform their enterprises by embracing and leveraging Pivotal’s Cloud Native platform more quickly.“

“When we started CloudCredo, we were profoundly influenced by The Pivotal Way. It shaped our approach to modern software development, our culture promoting openness and doing things the right way, and passion for delivering differentiated value to our customers,” says Colin Humphreys, CloudCredo Co-Founder and CEO.“ Joining Pivotal allows us to operate at a global scale, overnight, and help the world's largest and most admired brands use software to transform their businesses and make an impact on the world.”

MRV Communications reported quarterly revenue of $18.9 million, compared to $22.2 million, reflecting a lower contribution from legacy infrastructure management products, partially offset by growth of packet and optical products. Gross margin remained at 51.9%, compared to 52.0%, despite lower revenues of legacy products. There was a GAAP net loss from continuing operations of $3.9 million, or $0.56 per share, compared to a GAAP net loss from continuing operations of $1.3 million, or $0.18 per share.

“We entered 2016 as a better capitalized, more efficient and more focused company that is well-positioned for growth at high margins. While our legacy infrastructure management products have experienced a cyclical slowdown that impacted our results over the past few quarters, we are thrilled with the customer and market reaction to our new packet and optical product families,” stated MRV President and CEO Mark Bonney.